


Vinculum Somnis

by MajaLi



Category: Inception, Suits (TV)
Genre: M/M, Minor Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-17
Updated: 2011-12-17
Packaged: 2017-10-27 11:20:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,635
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/295265
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MajaLi/pseuds/MajaLi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Harvey's little brother Arthur contacts him for the first time in two years, it can only be for one reason: to ask for Harvey's help with an extraction.  Now, Harvey's being drawn back into a world he thought he'd left behind, with the added bonus of dragging Mike along with him. And if there's one person Harvey doesn't want in his head, it's Mike Ross.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Vinculum Somnis

**Author's Note:**

> So, so many thanks to my amazing betas rattetta, who is the Tommy Shepherd of proofreaders, and khasael, who coaxed, coddled, cheerleaded, and, when necessary, kicked my _ass_ (though I wear the bruises with pride) through this entire fic, without whom it never would have been finished. ♥ Originally written for the first Suits Big Bang; masterpost and link to whimsicalimages's lovely art is [here](http://suitsbigbang.livejournal.com/5034.html).

_vinculum juris (Latin): lit. "the chain of the law"; legally binding_

The guy in line before Mike is taking _forever_. Bad enough that Mike finished the Rosencrantz briefs with barely ten minutes to spare to run out to the hot dog cart for lunch, but then this asshole had to cut him off two seconds before he got in line. Mike would swear that the guy – who had been sitting on one of the fountain benches outside Pearson Hardman, twiddling his thumbs and watching the passing crowds – did it on purpose, except that that's an unhealthy and paranoid thought, and Mike's been trying really hard not to end up as self-centered as Harvey.

"A hot dog," the guy says, tapping his chin. He's English, which Mike thinks might explain why he's wearing a tweed jacket paired with the most hideously green Oxford Mike's ever seen (and that's just another reason Mike really needs to start spending more time away from Harvey, if he's criticizing a random stranger's shirt). "With sauerkraut, I think, and onions, and mustard – d'you have proper mustard? Only because you're the third fellow I've asked, and—"

"Mustard's mustard," grunts the hot dog vendor, as Mike glances at his watch for the fifth time and wonders if he should just skip lunch. But he's starving, and he should still be fine if he takes the stairs...and maybe sprints. "Anything else?"

"Ah…relish! Can't forget the relish." The guy half turns, digging for his wallet, and for the first time seems to notice Mike's agitation. "Oh, I've rather taken my time, haven't I?" he says, with a guilty smile. "Here, what'll you have, then?" Mike opens his mouth to protest, but the guy has already turned back to the vendor. "And one of the same for him, if you don't mind."

Before Mike is entirely sure what's just happened, the guy is clapping an arm around his shoulders and thrusting a loaded dog at him, steering them both away from the cart.

"Cheers, mate!" he says happily, and promptly stuffs half of his into his mouth, bun, toppings, and all. Mike is – kind of impressed actually. He's only ever seen Harvey manage that much (and hadn't that image haunted him for days; Mike reminds himself yet again to focus on the part where Harvey was _talking with his mouth full_ and not the…other part).

"Thanks," he says. "Really. But I gotta—"

"Oh, yeah, sure." The guy swallows hugely and waves Mike off. "Good to meet you. Give Harvey a good snog for me!"

"Crazy tourists," Mike mutters, jaded as only a trueborn New Yorker can be, as he walks away.

It's not until he's halfway up the stairs that he actually registers what the guy _said_.

\-- -- --

There are two Harveys in Harvey's office.

Mike stops short in front of the door, blinks – and is relieved to see that, no, his boss hasn't acquired an evil twin from a parallel dimension or temporally duplicated himself in violation of the fundamental laws of the space-time continuum. (Though, Mike has to admit, if there's anyone who could find a loophole in those laws…) The man standing beside Harvey is the closest to a doppelganger Mike's ever seen – from his slicked-back hair to his silk waistcoat – but he's slimmer and shorter than Harvey, his face a little thinner and a little less careworn.

"— _years_ out of practice," Mike hears Harvey say, through the closed door. The man snorts.

"A rusty professional is better than an idiot amateur," he argues. "Come on, with Ariadne out of commission for the next nine months, we're already having enough trouble with our architect."

"So do it as a three-man job. Isn't that what you and Cobb did anyway?" Is it Mike's imagination, or does Harvey sound bitter?

"Yeah, after you _abandoned us_ ," the man snaps. He throws up his hands and starts to turn away. "I don't even know why I bothered coming here."

"Arthur, wait!" Harvey all but leaps after him. When the man looks back at him, there's something defeated about Harvey's posture. "I'll take the job. All right?"

Even in profile, Mike can see the man's – Arthur's – face light up. Mike's jaw drops as he throws himself into Harvey's arms, hugging him like he's a little kid and Harvey is the biggest, fluffiest teddy bear in the world – and Harvey _hugs him back_. Arthur whispers something, lips moving too slightly for Mike to catch. It's a long moment before he breaks away, giving Harvey one last squeeze and sweeping out the door. He straightens his tie, gives Mike a brief nod and Donna a little smile and wave as he passes. Then he's gone, and Harvey's poking his head out the door, scowling at Mike.

"Was there something you wanted, or do you always feel the need to eavesdrop on family meetings?"

"Yeah, I finished reading the – wait, family?" Mike interrupts himself. "Oh, God, tell me he's not your son."

Donna bursts out laughing as Harvey splutters.

"How old do you think I am?!" he demands. "Jesus…no, he's not my _son_. Arthur is my brother. We're only five years apart," he adds, with a hint of a sulk.

"Aw, sweetie," Donna manages through her chortles, "don't worry. He's just got one of those baby faces…you know, last time we went out for drinks, he got carded? I felt like such a cougar." She sounds positively gleeful at the thought.

"Card—he just turned thirty!" Harvey groans, then catches himself and glances at Mike. "Okay, come on." He snaps his fingers. "Briefs. What'd you find?"

"You know, Louis does that, too. Are you sure you want to be—"

Harvey rolls his eyes and drags Mike inside.

\-- -- --

Later, after Mike is gone, Harvey comes outside and cocks his hip up against Donna's desk.

"You and Arthur go for drinks?" he asks carefully. She looks up, studies him for a moment. The frown lines around his mouth have deepened again, and not even an hour with Mike has smoothed them away this time. Then she sighs.

"He likes to know how you are," she says. "You know, he thinks you don’t have time for him now? And he's worried about you."

"Ha!" Harvey grimaces. "That's a new one. Him, worried about me." He laughs a little, low and humorless. "Me, not have time for him."

Donna reaches out, puts a tentative hand on his arm. "Harvey, I don't know what happened two years ago, but—"

"You don't _want_ to know," Harvey says firmly, pulling away and standing up straight. "Trust me."

After a moment, Donna asks, "You want me to keep meeting up with him?" She's only half asking, really.

"…yeah." Harvey swallows. "Yeah, that'd be…thanks."

Donna watches him go and wonders, for the first time in years, if Harvey is keeping something important from her.

\-- -- --

"The Royal Terrace Suite," Harvey says, shutting the door behind him and pocketing the spare keycard. "You decided to run your operation out of the Royal Terrace Suite at the goddamn Plaza Hotel."

"Problem?" Eames asks, leaning back in his chair and kicking his feet up onto an ottoman. Harvey ignores him in favor of glaring at his idiot brother until Arthur folds with a sigh.

"It's not as high-profile as you think," he says, placating. "Saito's sponsoring us, backing Eames's aliases—"

"And why the hell would he do that?" Harvey demands, hauling his still-knotted tie over his head and dumping it on the back of a chair, along with his jacket.

"Because he likes the idea of having his own team of pet mindfuckers?" Eames suggests. "And will you stop ignoring me?"

"Because Dom and Ariadne saved his life," Arthur says. He follows Harvey's example, both of them rolling up their sleeves with identical, brisk flicks of the wrist.

"Bloody hell. I'd forgotten how scary you two are, together."

"Scary? Not nearly." Arthur smiles at him affectionately.

"Not _yet_." Harvey grumbles. Arthur swats at him in passing and opens the closet, crouching to reach under the extensive shoe rack. Eames stares at Arthur's ass and licks his lips; Harvey stares at Eames and contemplates homicide.

There's a muffled squeak from the direction of the suite proper, and Harvey turns to see a pretty Indian girl standing on the threshold between the sitting room and the dining room, hands at her mouth. Eames stands with a smile and draws her inside.

"Don't worry," he says, smiling broadly. "Harvey here won't actually kill me; he likes Arthur far too much to put him through the aftermath. Medea, this is Harvey. He used to be one of the best extractors in the business, so he'll be our primary for this job. Harvey, meet Medea. She comes Ariadne- and Cobb-recommended, so that should tell you everything you need to know about her potential as an architect."

Harvey looks her up and down, shakes her hand – her grip is steady, but passive – and steps away to start dragging chairs into a rough circle. "Has she been up against subconscious security yet? I'm assuming that's why you need me," he adds pointedly. Arthur rolls his eyes and flips the PASIV open on the central ottoman.

"Not yet," he answers. "We were hoping to do her first run with them today. My mind, of course."

"Sure you can keep them under control?" Harvey asks, leaning back in one of the chairs as Eames gets Medea settled to his left. "Yours have a tendency to get vicious, as I recall."

"All the better, then." Medea pipes up suddenly. "Whatever Guildenstern has in place, it can't be as bad as the security of a trained dreamer." Harvey's a bit taken aback, but can't help looking at her with a new bit of respect.

"Probably true," he allows. "Though you'd be surprised. We had this one job in Mombasa—" Harvey grins when Eames winces theatrically.

"I thought you had a no-talking-about-jobs-with-the-uninvolved rule," he complains. "Attorney-client privilege and all that."

"Yes, Eames, the virtually undetectable theft of intellectual property is _absolutely_ an act whose nondisclosure is governed by attorney-client privilege rather than a healthy instinct for self preservation."

"You arse, you've been right there in the thick of it with us since the beginning—"

" 'Us'? I'm sorry, is your last name actually Cobb? Because otherwise—"

" _Guys!_ " Arthur snaps, standing up with the handful of PASIV needles in his fist. "Can we be done with the pissing contest for now? Please?" He hands two to Eames – apparently Medea still needs help; she's already not endearing herself to Harvey – and holds out the third for Harvey to take.

"Need a hand?" he asks, grinning like the little bastard he is. Harvey snatches the needle, uncaps it, and slips it into his arm in one smooth motion. Arthur lies down and sticks out a leg, tapping the PASIV's center button with his heel (and if Harvey ever needed an indication that his brother's been in the business _far too long_ , that's it right there). The familiar rush of Somnacin wells up in Harvey's veins; he recognizes the feel of this compound, one of Dom's, the same one he and Arthur trained on. It's like a soft pillow to sink his head into; like a thick comforter on a chilly night; like warm, dry clothes after being out in the snow. Harvey lets it wash over him, buoying him up and out of his body—

—and onto a floating terrace café in an unfamiliar cityscape, something like London if London were built a hundred fifty feet off the ground and for hundred-and-fifteen degree droughts. He spends an indeterminable amount of time sipping his lemon pie and flipping through yesterday's newspaper, while he waits for Mike to arrive. The humdinger offers him a complimentary slice of cherry wood, drizzled with silver glaze; Harvey takes it even though he can't have cherry wood on Thursdays. Mike will appreciate it when he gets here.

"Been a while, hasn't it?" Arthur asks, reaching out to steal a bite. Harvey slaps his wrist with the newspaper.

"That's for Mike," he scolds. Arthur just smiles.

"How did we get here, Harvey?"

That quickly, it all comes pouring back: the Somnacin, the hotel room, the job they're supposed to be prepping for and the architect they still need to train. A child sitting at the next table suddenly stops toying with her food and looks sharply at Harvey; Arthur gets between them, though, and draws Harvey out onto the street. Eames and Medea are waiting for them, him with a shit-eating grin, her just looking nervous.

"You owe me a tenner," he says to Arthur, when he spots them. "I told you you'd have to pull him out of it."

"I hate you," Harvey tells him, fervently. Then he's all business, turning to Medea with a calculating look on his face. "Is this the dream space you're using for the job?"

"It's a work in progress," Arthur says, with a warning look. "Do you want to take her, or do you need a round to adjust?"

"I'll take her," Harvey decides. "She needs to see how even a friendly mind can rip a professional limb from limb. Come on." He gestures imperiously at Medea, heading for one of the towering office buildings. "Can you change your appearance yet?"

"A little," she says, jogging to keep up. "I can do my hair, and sometimes my clothes—"

"Good. You're my PA." He cracks his neck and concentrates his gaze on the passersby. He feels his hair un-gel and fall curling around his temples and ears; he shrugs, lets the motion ripple down into his clothes. His suit jacket changes from pinstripes to pale linen, billowing out loosely behind him as his shirt loses half its buttons, becoming a green _kurta_. His pants retain their cut but match the pattern of his jacket; his oxfords reshape themselves into thin, brown loafers.

After a moment, he looks exactly like every other man on the street. He smiles proudly, just a little, just to himself – still got it, after all this time – and turns to find Medea staring at him with her mouth hanging open.

"You don't do it like Eames does," she says, sounding stunned. Harvey snorts.

"Eames is a talented idiot. Don't listen to a word he says." He looks her up and down and, satisfied with her appearance, pulls her into the building. He heads for the elevators immediately, flashing an empty palm at the security guard as though he's showing an I.D. badge. Medea, surprisingly, follows suit, but as they step into the elevator, she hisses,

"Where are we going?"

"My office, of course," Harvey says, blasé, smiling at the projections that whip around to stare at her. "New assistant," he explains, patting her lightly on the shoulder. They settle, on his reassurance, but now Harvey's on edge. When they get to the twelfth floor, Harvey leads them out and down a long hallway, frowning a little with concentration. They round a corner – and there's his office from Pearson Hardman, just as he was assuming there would be. Donna's not at her desk, obviously; Harvey installs Medea there instead.

"First rule of not getting ripped limb from limb," he says. "Don't screw around with the dream. Don't turn an office building into a park; don't turn a forest into a city. Second rule of not getting ripped limb from limb: don't screw around with yourself. Don't change your appearance any more than necessary, and don't just blink a new self into existence. Change things in bits and pieces. Lead the dreamer into it, by the nose if you have to, so they see the change and accept it as part of the dream."

"But you just changed yourself!" Medea protests. Harvey resists the urge to beat his head against the wall. It would draw attention.

"Well, I couldn't exactly wander around an Anglo-Indian cityscape in pinstripes and wool, now, could I?" He flaps his hand at her to sit down. "Get to work. Chat with anyone who comes by, but don't start any conversations. Act like every other P.A. in the building. Remember – they've already implicitly accepted you, by populating the architecture you created for them." Harvey smiles toothily. "If you do a good job, maybe you won't die messily."

He leaves her sitting there, pale and twitchy, and strides into his office. He's still got Mike's notes on the Rosencrantz case to think on, to craft a viable legal argument from his associate's mess of enthusiastic (if admittedly brilliant) scribbles.

Harvey is most of the way through reconstructing them in the margins of a book entitled "Products Liability" and filled with nothing but repetitions of the phrase _caveat emptor_ – which, really, that's all Harvey needs or wants to know about what Arthur thinks of his job – when he hears a commotion outside. He looks up to see Medea arguing with Arthur's projection of Jessica (he can tell she's Arthur's because she's about half again as tall as she is in real life, and her clothes are twice as tight). As Medea grows steadily more agitated, so does the projection – until suddenly she whips around, flips open a panel in the wall that wasn't there a moment ago, and slams her hand down on the bright red SECURITY button.

"Shit."

Harvey darts out of his office, grabbing Medea by the wrist and dragging her toward the emergency stairs as SWAT-suited projections swarm into the hallway from both ends.

"Third rule of not getting ripped limb from limb," he says, shoving her up toward the roof. "Once you've been spotted, change _everything_." He steps back a few paces, then runs forward and takes a flying leap, landing on the roof of the next building over with a soft grunt. To her credit, she follows after only a moment's hesitation. As soon as she's in the air, Harvey starts frowning at the office they've just come from – now swarming with Arthur's subconscious security – trying to see the reality of the dream with that familiar, peculiar _twist_.

All at once, the whole building shifts, starts to tilt – and then collapses in on itself, the roof folding down like a trapdoor, flattening the building and the projections inside it into two-dimensional impossibility.

"Yeah. I still got it," Harvey says happily. He steps off the roof and starts jogging down the side of the building, keeping well away from the windows. Medea once again manages to keep up.

"How did you do that?" she demands. "That was amazing! It shouldn't have been possible—"

"It _wasn't_ possible," he corrects. "You've seen Arthur's Penrose stairs?"

"Of course. It was one of the first things he showed me."

Harvey grins. "The [devil's fork](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blivet) is the _adult_ version."

They dodge two more waves of projections – Medea even attempts a rudimentary devil's fork of her own, though she loses it at the last minute and ends up just dumping their pursuers off an impromptu cliff – before Harvey is forced to pull out the heavy weaponry. It's messy and inelegant as final solutions go, and Harvey has never enjoyed it the way Arthur always seems to, but he can't deny that there's something primally satisfying about blasting away at your pursuers with a _big fucking gun_.

Beats working on mergers, anyway.

Slowly, inevitably, they lose ground against the horde. A sniper projection on a nearby roof catches Medea in the shoulder blade; she goes down with a scream. Harvey huffs, exasperated, and shoots her in the back of the head, grimacing as blood splatters over the hem of his pants. Her departure gives the projections pause -- they mill about, unsure, alternately surging toward him with open arms and dropping back, wild and wary -- until with a sigh Harvey drops the gun, steps forward, and surrenders to the chaos of his brother's subconscious.

\-- -- --

Afterwards – after debriefing and dinner and watching Arthur and Harvey squabble over the check – Eames sits on the bed and watches Arthur brush his teeth through the open door of the en suite.

"Remind me again why I agreed to work with your arse of a brother?" he says, because all Arthur can do at the moment is glare at Eames through a mouthful of suds. "I mean, my God, I didn't think it was possible, but he _actually got worse_ , it's incredible—"

"Y'dnsch—" Arthurs starts, then spits and tries again. "You didn't exactly help the situation, yourself."

"I was the soul of discretion," Eames sniffs, just for Arthur's affectionate eye-roll. He gets up and wanders over, wrapping his arms around Arthur's waist and hooking his chin over his shoulder. That Arthur lets him, even leans back into the embrace a little, is reassuring.

"You get so…tense around him," he says softly, nosing at Arthur's ear. "And you haven't bothered getting this dressed up in ages, not since the Fischer job."

"I've barely gotten this _dressed_ since the Fischer job." Arthur smiles, wry, and tilts his head invitingly. Naturally, Eames presses his advantage, mouthing along the long curve of Arthur's throat. He wonders how long Arthur will be able to keep talking. "Like it or not, this is our world – Harvey's and mine." Arthur pauses. Sighs. "Harvey's even more than mine, now."

"And let him have it, I say," Eames grumbles. "He's a prick."

Arthur elbows him in the ribs.

"Watch it; that's still my brother you're talking about," he says. "Unless you want to train a new extractor as well."

Eames shudders theatrically and gives Arthur's jaw an apologetic nip. "No, thanks. Ariadne's little advisee is more than enough unknown variable for my taste."

"She's talented," Arthur allows. "She did well today."

"Your brother covered for her. I was watching."

"Can we please not talk about this now?" Arthur tilts his head back, twisting to look Eames in the eye. "I'm tired, I ache, and since Medea's gone out, I'd really, really like you to fuck me through the mattress before I completely collapse."

It's a little sad that after a whole year, Arthur can still take him from _lazily interested_ to _oh God let me get in you **right now**_ in three seconds flat.

Then again, Eames thinks, as Arthur drops his robe and starts attacking Eames's shirt buttons, even after a whole year, they've still got plenty of time to make up for.

\-- -- --

Harvey goes back to the office. He needs to be somewhere familiar – somewhere _real_ – right now, and his apartment just isn't going to cut it. It's not like he spends any more time there than here, after all.

Harvey refuses to think that that's sad.

He holds out for almost an hour, flipping through his Mike-annotated briefs and rolling his eyes (in exasperation, not amusement, never amusement) at the little >:( and \o/! and wtf?'s scrawled in the margins. Eventually, though, he gets up and wanders over to his record shelves. _Hideaway_ is still waiting for him; a little cliché, a little predictable, maybe, but Harvey just couldn't resist. He slips the record out of its sleeve and lays it aside, carefully peels apart the layers of cardboard that took hours to steam open without wrinkles.

"Ace of Spades," he whispers, though he knows he shouldn't, and pulls out the long-hidden playing card.

It's blank.

Harvey can't help the sigh of relief that whooshes out of him. Dom Cobb may have had some...paranoid notions about dream architecture, but totems were one thing he and Mal got right. Harvey runs his thumb over the glossy, white face of his, feeling for the familiar scratches and grooves – not an intended part of the totem, but a welcome one – and scowls, and thinks.

But when he finally leaves, the totem is tucked inside his vest, hidden in the discreet inner pocket that he's never told René to stop including.

\-- -- --

"You look tired." Mike frowns at Harvey, and leans in a little closer. "Really tired. Are you still worried about the Rosencrantz case? Because I was talking to Rachel, and she said—"

"Just…be quiet for a minute, would you?" Mike's jaw obediently snaps shut – and nearly drops again in astonishment, when Harvey props his elbows on his knees and rubs his face, then roughly scrubs his hands through his hair. He's silent for several seconds.

"Okay," he says at last. "Right. Where were we?"

_Naptime_ , Mike wants to say, but doesn't. Instead, he steals the file from under Harvey's hand and snaps it shut, slips it into the folder with the rest of the case materials, and tucks the whole thing firmly between his back and the cushions of Harvey's leather office sofa.

"What the hell do you think you're doing?"

"If we keep going, you're just going to yell at me for not being useful," Mike points out, quite reasonably, he thinks. "I don't want to get yelled at."

"You—"

"It's almost eleven-thirty. Just admit you're tired, old man." Harvey's red-eyed glare just makes him grin wider, especially when Harvey leans forward and tries to steal the folder out from behind him. "Ah-ah-ah, no way—hey! Aaaah!" Mike yelps as Harvey lunges across the low table and gets a knee on the sofa, pinning Mike's shoulder to the sofa with one hand as he reaches around him with the other. Mike is bendier, though, and manages to twist out from under him, laughing as he gets the folder in hand and tucks it into the back of his pants, squirming around to lie on his back on the sofa.

He's underestimated the audacity of Harvey Specter, however; Harvey is apparently perfectly happy to bracket Mike's hips with his knees and wrap Mike's tie around his hand, hauling Mike forward so Harvey can plaster himself against him from neck to groin and reach around to fumble for the folder.

Which, naturally, means that Donna chooses that exact moment to call over the intercom, "Stop playing with the puppy, Harvey, Arthur's here to see you." And Mike, although he's long given up at convincing Donna that he has any semblance of professional dignity or, really, adulthood in general, freezes at the sound of an unfamiliar male voice in the hall.

"Harvey got a puppy? This I have to see—"

Harvey makes no move to climb off Mike, but cranes his neck around so he can peer at the doorway. There's the sound of footsteps and then, in profile, Mike sees Harvey's face split into a huge grin as his brother walks in.

"Twice in one week?" he asks. "What ever happened to refusing to set foot in the domain of the soulless corporate bastards that seduced me away from my true calling?"

Arthur rolls his eyes. "Putting words in my mouth isn't going to keep me from giving you shit for giving me and Eames shit," he says, unbuttoning his waistcoat and sitting down in Harvey's recently-vacated chair.

"What—oh, you mean this?" Harvey gestures between himself and Mike. "No, no, this is just—hang on—aha!" He finally unwedges the folder from between Mike's pants and shirt and holds it up triumphantly, releasing Mike's tie and letting him flop onto his back with a _whump_ and a startled yelp. Harvey climbs off him and clambers back across the table, prods at Arthur with the folder until Arthur huffs and gives him his seat back. "What's going on?"

Arthur cuts a sharp look at Mike, his face suddenly unreadable. Harvey frowns.

"Mike is like Donna," he starts. "Anything you say to me, you can—"

"Eames wants you to take Medea under."

Harvey's face goes suddenly, frighteningly blank.

"He can't—"

" _Harvey._ " Arthur addresses his brother, but his gaze is fixed on Mike – and Mike gets the sudden, unmistakable impression that the biggest problem this guy would have with killing him would be figuring out how to make it up to Harvey afterwards.

Well. Mike can take a hint, even if Harvey won't.

"I'll just… see you guys later, then," he says, and flees.

"Don't let Arthur intimidate you!" Donna shouts after him – probably more for Harvey's benefit than his – as he vanishes down the hall toward his cubicle. Mike snorts.

"Too late!" he yells over his shoulder.

Way, _way_ too fucking late.

\-- -- --

"That girl is not coming into my head," Harvey says flatly, once Mike is gone. Arthur sighs and rests his elbows on his knees.

"We really, really, don't have a choice."

"The _kind_ of security, alone—"

"Will do more to mentally prepare her for the kind of hostility that she'll face in Guildenstern's mind than fifty practice runs with me and Eames. Give me one good reason—"

"Because I like her!" Harvey snaps, sitting forward and glaring at his brother. "She's talented, she's sharp, and she's a damn good architect. Maybe as good as Mal, some day. You don't have the right to ruin that for her just because you're impatient to get a job done."

"I have _every_ right!" Arthur glares right back, his posture a mirror image of Harvey's. "This isn't a nice, high-end job, Harvey, okay, with—with school and internships and a fucking career development office on the fourteenth floor. I need her for what she can do today, not what she could do in five years if she had someone to dote on her the way you dote on your _protégé_."

Harvey shoots to his feet; Arthur is only a split second behind.

"Leave Mike out of this!"

"Why? You know I talk to Donna; are you scared I've heard about what he can do? Wait, I thought you wanted me to give a flying fuck about that kind of stuff!"

"That is _not_ what I meant!"

"Hey, I don’t care, if you think he could be in shape faster than her—"

" _For fuck's sake, Arthur!_ "

Arthur stops in mid-sentence and blinks.

"Seriously?"

Harvey glares harder, but he can feel his cheeks flush.

"Shut up," he mutters.

"No, wait, so when you two were screwing around on the sofa before…oh, God."

"Oh, _God_ ," Harvey echoes, and hides his face in his palm. "Get out of my office."

"I'm not in your office, I'm in my shoes."

"Transitive property."

"Circumstances too remote."

"Donna!" Harvey shouts.

"Arthur, I have drink tickets for _Le Joueur Malheureux_ but they're only good until midnight," Donna calls back obediently.

"…damn you." Arthur points an accusatory finger at Harvey. "You win this round."

"I win _every_ round," Harvey says, smug grin firmly back in place. "Always have, always will."

"Yeah, because you cheat."

"What was that? I'm sorry, I couldn't hear you over the sound of the clock ticking—"

"And this doesn't mean I've forgotten about Medea, either."

Harvey starts whistling the theme song from Jeopardy.

" _Damn_ you," Arthur groans – but he leaves.

\-- -- --

Mike is sulking on the lip of the fountain outside Pearson Hardman, glaring at the white styrofoam box with his takeaway gyros and waiting for Arthur to emerge so he knows Harvey's office is safe again. Someone sits down beside him; Mike just catches a flash of hideous, mustard-yellow sleeve before the box is snatched up, and the lid flipped open to assail Mike's nostrils with the scents of lamb, cucumber, and fresh pita.

"I don't understand how you don't like gyros," says Eames cheerfully, around a mouthful of dripping grease and tzatziki. "Really, I don't, they're more or less the pinnacle of late night culinary achievement."

"What the _hell_?" Mike gapes. "No, seriously—"

"Don't get your knickers in a twist, I won't eat Harvey's." Eames waves the already half-devoured gyro at Mike placatingly. "But Arthur's been running me ragged all day, and you can't really begrudge me. You only choke down the bloody things because they're from Harvey's favorite vendor and it gives you a warm, fuzzy feeling when you think about how excited he was to introduce you."

If Mike wasn't already sitting down, he would be now. Hard.

"Who _are_ you?"

"Old friend of the Specter boys," Eames says, and stuffs the end of the gyro into his mouth. "Both of whom are going to be in very big trouble, very soon, unless you decide to help them out."

"No, stop, I've been here before," Mike says, edging away along the lip of the fountain (though not without tugging the gyro box along with him). "You're creepy, and probably illegal, and, and I don't trust you at all. Also I get the feeling Harvey would rip my ears off if he caught me talking to you."

"What? No, more likely mine; he'd rather like to nibble on yours too much to do any permanent damage."

Mike is saved from having to come up with a coherent reply to that by the sudden reappearance of Harvey's brother, looming over them and glaring down at Eames.

"Pack it in," he says shortly. "We're on a schedule."

"Coming, love!" Eames pops to his feet with a blinding grin and shoots Mike a wave and a wink. "Give me a call if you get curious!" he calls over his shoulder, as Arthur drags him toward the subway.

Mike thinks very, very hard for a few minutes before getting up to bring the last gyro to Harvey—and when he finally gets home and checks his cell, there's a new number gleaming invitingly in his speed dial, far more tempting…far less terrifying…than it has any right to be.

\-- -- --

Eames is sprawled out on Arthur's (nominal) bed, staring at the ceiling and wondering if Arthur's order not to open the door ("Not for anything, Eames. I mean it. I haven't been in Harvey's mind in years, there's no telling what might happen. And don’t think I don't remember what happened in Lisbon because I _do_ , and I will kill you, and then I will let Harvey kill you, too.") extends to room service. He frowns, pondering rack of lamb with eggplant puree or a nice, classic rib eye—both have their merits, and—

" _Kyaaaaaaah!_ " Medea's shriek is high and piercing. She sits bolt upright, eyes wide and terrified, and claws her way out of the lounge chair. The Somnacin needle rips out of her arm with a sickening squelch and drops to the floor in a sprinkle of blood. Medea doesn't seem to notice; she's too busy scrambling away from Arthur and Harvey as they blink their way into wakefulness. Arthur groans, low and familiar, as he sits up, but Harvey continues to lie back, breathing deep, slow breaths through his nose.

" _You,_ " Medea hisses, rounding on Eames. "You told me this would be safe! You told me you wanted me to build things! You never said anything about—about working with a _psychopathic monster!_ "

Eames straightens his spine, meeting her furious gaze inch for inch.

"I told you there would be risks," he says, kicking his feet back and forth over the edge of the bed, leaning to keep his hands out of sight as he casually reaches back.

"I don't care!" Medea swoops toward the door, not even stopping to grab her bag from the coat rack. "I'm leaving, my god, I am _leaving_ and you can't stop me—"

Eames fires.

The suppressed shot echoes in the nearly silent hotel room; Eames is extremely grateful they've the whole floor to themselves. Arthur barely flinches, on his feet in an instant and then kneeling at her side on the floor. Harvey, however, is frozen where he'd been struggling into a sitting position, eyes just a little too wide as he stares Eames down.

"Please tell me I didn't just become an accessory to murder."

"Don't be an idiot," Arthur snaps, one hand checking Medea's pulse as he pulls the tranquilizer dart from her thigh with the other. "In what universe are Eames and I incapable of encouraging a half-trained, novice dreamer to sublimate memories that are already tenuous at best?"

Harvey blinks, long and slow.

"Dreaming's changed, hasn't it?" he says quietly.

"It's been _two years_." Arthur stands, slinging Medea over his shoulders with a grunt, and kicks Eames's shin until he rolls out of the way and lets Arthur set her down. "We should do it now," he adds, pointedly refusing to meet Harvey's eye. "You can show yourself out, yeah?"

For a moment, it looks like Harvey's about to say something – but he stops, before Eames can see more than a hint of it in the hard line of his shoulders, the hurt furrow between his brows. Then he levers himself to his feet, and the next time Eames blinks, the door is clicking up behind him.

"That might have been a little harsh, love," he says, giving Arthur's shoulder an affectionate nudge as he goes to reset the PASIV.

"Really?"

"Yeah."

"…huh."

\-- -- --

Donna finds Harvey in his office late that night, sprawled out on the leather chaise with the lights off and his tie and jacket in a silken puddle on the floor. She hasn't bothered knocking in close to ten years; she's not about to start again now.

"Did you ever wonder?" Harvey asks the ceiling, the moment her stocking feet clear the threshold. Donna pauses, then shrugs, trots over to his desk, and hoists herself up onto the edge.

"Wonder what?"

"Why I never brought you in."

"I always assumed it was because you knew I wasn't completely insane." She kicks futilely in Harvey's direction when he laughs. "I'm not kidding!"

"Of course not. You never kid." Harvey sits up against the backdrop of New York's night skyline, silhouetted in office windows and air-traffic lights.

"Arthur's going to ask me for Mike."

"What, for keeps?"

Harvey shrugs. "Maybe."

"And what does Mike have to say about it?"

Harvey tenses up, the tight line of his back and shoulders visible even under his waistcoat, and Donna lets out a gusty sigh.

"You're such a wuss."

\-- -- --

Mike fidgets, perched on a bench in Central Park, and scans the crowd for any sign of Eames. He taps his phone restlessly against his jittering leg; Harvey's been trying to train the nerves out of him, but for every tell he quashes, another one crops up in its place. Suddenly, a frisbee whizzes past his head. Mike yelps, then ducks as an enormous white dog comes barreling after it, scrambling up and over the bench and thwacking Mike in the face with its tail.

"Dief! You crazy—hey, sorry about him." A blond guy with unnervingly spiky hair leans down and pats Mike apologetically on the shoulder as Mike splutters the fur out of his mouth. "He gets kinda overenthusiastic about the whole frisbee thing, and my aim's not so good when I don't have my glasses."

"No problem," Mike manages, face flaming, as the guy starts patting him down for injuries. "Seriously, I'm fine—"

"How is it," and Mike freezes at the sound of Harvey's voice on the other side of the bench, "that you whine about having too much work to go to the Bar Association dinner, but you have plenty of time to pick up guys in the park?"

"I wasn't—he had a—oh, _come on!_ " Mike gestures futilely, but the guy's already run off again. "What are you even doing here?"

"Meeting a business associate, not that it's any of your business. You?"

Mike starts to answer, but suddenly his mouth snaps shut and he peers at Harvey with narrowed eyes.

"Hello, Eames."

"Damn!" The voice is still Harvey's, but the foot-stomp and fist-pump are Eames all over. "How'd you catch me?"

"That's a three-piece suit," Mike grins. "Where's the vest? Plus, Harvey never wears tie-pins…and he doesn't know I'm gay."

"Ah. Well, two out of three isn't bad," Eames concedes. Mike frowns and starts to ask what he means, but Eames blinks back into his own form and suddenly everyone in the park is staring at them.

"Don't look at them," Eames hisses, as he claps a friendly arm around Mike's shoulders and draws him onto the path. "Unless you want to see them rip me to shreds, which, granted, you might, but it'd rather put paid to today's lesson."

"Why would they rip you to shreds? _I_ don't want to rip you to shreds," Mike points out.

"True, but you also don't want me to have unbridled access to your darkest and most shameful secrets. Do you?" Eames sounds intrigued, but Mike can't help wincing a bit.

"No…no, but there _has_ to be a less violent way of—"

"Schedule, love," Eames interrupts, and jerks a thumb at a clock tower—something like Big Ben, something like the Chrysler Building—as it shimmers into existence off in the distance, just close enough to be readable. "How many times have you been to Central Park?"

"You know my shoe size and sexual orientation, but not that my parents lived in Manhattan?"

Eames grins, wicked and just a little feral.

"Excellent practice for getting lost, then."

\-- -- --

"Architecture—is mostly—about—paradoxes," Eames explains as they hurtle pell-mell along another winding path, fleeing the steadily growing hoard of Mike's projections. "There are other elements...psycho-realism, lack thereof, cuing the dreamer, what have you, you get the idea. But really the point of the thing is to keep your mark's subconscious from devouring your team before they get the information you're after. Brute force is, as always, perfectly acceptable—"

Eames snaps his fingers, and Mike hears a low rumbling behind them. He glances over his shoulder just in time to see the ground fall away in front of the nearest projections, as they round a corner some thirty yards behind. They don't topple into the void though – just keep running, vanishing under the lip of the hole like a ship over the horizon. Mike laughs, delighted.

"You made a Mobius strip!"

Eames freezes. Mike continues a few steps beyond him—and then shrugs and keeps going, twisting the ground beneath his feet so that a moment later he's right back beside Eames.

"How did you know that?" Eames looks perturbed. "More importantly, how did you _do_ that?"

"…because you just did it?" Mike tries. "With the—and the—" he gestures widely, trying to encompass the way he felt the dream space change, like Eames had been fiddling around with the map of it inside Mike's head.

"Make it a Klein bottle," Eames demands. Mike blinks.

"Klein…?"

"You know, the thing with the—" One [pops into existence](http://epicthings.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Klein-Bottle.jpg) in Eames's hand, glass and tubular and brimming with amber liquid, exactly like the decanter Mike's grandfather had kept on his dresser.

"Brandy? Really?" Mike rolls his eyes (to be fair, Grandpa Jimmy had done the same thing), but concentrates, feeling around the edges of the dream space. He's close but… "Not quite right," he murmurs, eyes unfocused as he half-sees the unnatural topography of this world laid over the familiar greenery of Central Park. True Klein bottles aren't entirely three-dimensional—they're more like—and _shifted_ —

Mike can feel it the moment it takes, and he shakes himself abruptly, coming out of it to see Eames watching him with cocked head and restless fingers.

"Did you do it?" He flaps impatiently at Mike's blank stare. "God knows I can't tell, we're not all architectural prodigies with an instinctive grasp of oneiric paradox."

So Mike thinks, and frowns again—

And shows him.

\-- -- --

"We need him," is the first thing Arthur says, when Eames gets done recounting the afternoon's lesson. He's curled up in the suite's armchair with a veritable nest of throw pillows; Eames is stretched out naked on the sofa, like a bad parody of that one scene in _Titanic_. "We definitely, definitely need him."

"I told you he'd come in handy." Eames crosses his arms behind his head and arches backward, working out the kinks that always seem to follow him back after he's been forging. "Harvey won't like it."

"Harvey isn't running point on this job," Arthur snaps. Then he sighs. "What else can we do? Medea wasn't going to hold up, I saw it, you saw it—"

" _I_ told you we shouldn't have listened to Ariadne in the first place." Eames sounds altogether too cheerful for a man whose next paycheck is about to go up in smoke. "He's your brother. Talk him around."

"…maybe I should see what he can do for myself, first."

"Aw, love, don't tell me you're scared of Harvey!"

Arthur chucks a pillow at him.

\-- -- --

"How long do you think we'll need?" Arthur cuts a glance at Mike and gets a bewildered frown in return. "Well?"

"Why are you asking me?"

"You're the architect, you know what you can do and how fast you can work. How long will it take for you to show me that the labyrinth you and Eames designed will stand up to Guildenstern's sub security?"

"You know, it'd help if you actually told me what you've found out about her security—" Mike starts, indignantly and for the hundredth time. Arthur cuts him off.

"The less you know, the better. This you don't need to know." He holds up a syringe and a vial of Somnacin. "How long?"

Mike makes a face, but answers.

"Call it four hours, dream time. Six if she's really good." Something must flash across Arthur's face, because Mike cocks his head and smirks. "Unless you think your security isn't twice as good as hers?"

Arthur sniffs and shoves Mike down into a chair.

"You evade my security for more than _two_ hours, dream time, and we'll talk." But he measures out the full six-hour dose anyway. It can't hurt to take a push at just how good the kid is, and without Eames to protect, this run will be easier for Mike anyway.

Arthur sits down, swabs his arm, and slides the needle in with a familiar wince – and looks over to see Mike fixing him with a particularly challenging stare.

"Talk is cheap," he says. "I think I should get something better if I can keep you running longer than that."

"Better, as in…?"

"I want full disclosure," Mike says, bald-faced and bordering on a very Harvey kind of arrogance. "I want to know how Harvey's involved in this, and why Eames thought he'd be in danger, and why the _hell_ the two of you decided to leverage half my life against me to get me involved."

"If you're that unsure of us, it was pretty stupid to take us up on the offer in the first place," Arthur points out. Mike shrugs.

"I'm not unsure. You're Harvey's brother. But I'd still like to know what's going on."

Arthur is surprised to find he almost believes it. However, he decides to defer settling, once and for all, the question of whether Mike is touchingly loyal or just touched in the head, in favor of giving the center button a sharp kick and tumbling backwards into the dream.

\-- -- --

Next time, Mike swears to himself. Next time, he is going to figure out _how to run in dreams_ , because seriously, he's not actually running at all, and even if he were it wouldn't have been for more than a few minutes, real time, and he _still_ has a stitch in his side and his breath is painfully short and seriously, _seriously_ — _ **next time**_.

He'd been doing fine wandering around Arthur's dreamscape, enjoying the approximation of early spring in Mombasa and swallowing up any projections that looked like they were about to call sub security on him into pocket dimensions. What he'd failed to realize, however, was just how fast Arthur's projections caught on. He'd had twenty impossible, paradoxical loops going within the first two hours, and that was before some of the projections figured out how to slip between them.

Mike could remember almost anything – but that didn't mean he could remember it all at once. They'd started breaking out entirely around the four hour mark, some running for the large, black security towers that started to crop up with alarming frequency, others morphing into frightening caricatures of SWAT officers like something out of _The Matrix_.

So now, Mike is fleeing at full tilt through the increasingly hostile alleyways of the city with one eye on the glowing red countdown hanging high in the greying sky. Arthur's fair, at least, Mike has to give him that. He hasn't noticed the numbers freezing up or doubling back; the seconds tick away with – hah – clock-like precision. He rounds a corner, gasping for breath and wondering if he's made enough headway to pause and recover—

And smacks straight into a waistcoated, slick-haired projection of Harvey.

"Fuck!" he yelps, scrambling backwards. His first thought is the gun hanging heavily ( _next time, oh my god_ ) at his side, but Arthur's projections are strangely bulletproof and, anyway, Mike knows it'd be kidding himself to think he could shoot Harvey in the face. Even fake, hostile-projection Harvey. Instead, Mike dodges around the projection and twists the ground out from under his feet, roping him into a loop like Zeno's paradox so that no matter how close he gets to Mike, he'll never close that crucial distance between them.

"Oh, yeah, you're adorable," Harvey snarls, and snags Mike by the shirt collar.

Mike gapes.

"Wha—you— _Harvey?_ "

"No, I'm a projection of Arthur's that has not only gained sentience but can grasp the inconsistencies of a paradox that's stumped Logic 101 students for years. What the hell were you thinking?!"

"What the hell are you—ahh!" Mike shouts and tries to duck behind Harvey as an enormous tank straight out of a WWII comic book drops from the sky and crashes down onto the narrow street, flattening buildings beneath its oversized treads. Soldiers spill out of it, replicas of the A-Team and Easy Company, the Howling Commandos and the old (hot) ex-Marine from…one of those CSI shows.

"Stay down," Harvey hisses, and kicks Mike's feet out from under him. Mike goes down hard, with a grunt; Harvey stands astride him, feet on either side of Mike's shoulders, and says cheerfully, "Afternoon, Special Agent Gibbs!"

"Sir." The ex-Marine nods and lowers his weapon fractionally. "Mind telling us what you're doing here?"

"Just passing through. Thought I'd drop in and say hi to my little brother."

"In the middle of a manhunt?"

"No one to hunt here, I'm afraid." Harvey spreads his legs a little wider, sticks his hands in his pockets, and fixes Gibbs with a firm stare. "Just me. Passing through."

Gibbs nods, thin-lipped but obedient.

" _Company! Form up! Next quadrant!_ " he bellows over his shoulder, and the soldiers and tank melt away, until Mike is alone with Harvey on the empty street, sprawled out and staring up at him in confusion.

"Um. What just happened?"

"You ever read that folk tale about the villager who hid Death under her skirt?" Harvey reaches down to haul Mike to his feet. "She hid him so well even the gods couldn't touch him." He taps his temple, and smiles grimly. "Belief is a powerful thing. Let's talk."

Harvey snaps his fingers.

\-- -- --

"This. This's. Amaaaaaaazing," Mike slurs, grinning at the bright blue daiquiri in his hand. He's draped face-down over a massage table planted in the white sand, with only a towel to preserve his modesty, getting worked over by a shirtless Harvey-projection. Mike thinks vaguely that that should bother him more than it does, same as the fact that the real Harvey is only a little ways down the beach, alternately staring at Mike and glaring into the distance.

"Oh, God." Arthur suddenly appears beside Mike, groaning and covering his eyes. "Harvey, please, I am begging you, _put your shirt back on_."

"Nothing you haven't seen before," Harvey snaps, striding over. Mike starts to sit up and take notice, but subsides with a moan when the projection kneads his knuckles into a particularly hard knot on his lower back. "I knew you were going to ask me to bring Mike in. I didn't think you had the balls to do it behind my back."

Arthur shrugs.

"I was going to. Tomorrow, actually. But if Eames hadn't already started working with him, he'd never have been ready in time for the job."

"Just how early did you start suspecting your architect wouldn't be able to hack it?!" Mike's never heard Harvey shout like this. He…kind of likes it actually. Above him, the projection laughs softly, hands slipping fractionally from his lower back to the curve of his rear.

"At this point in my life I assume anyone could flake out on me!" Arthur shouts back.

"What, and your solution is to take up with another complete unknown? You know, that actually explains so much about—"

Arthur shoots him in the shoulder.

"Gah!"

"Oh my god!" Mike scrambles off the table and lunges toward Harvey, but the projection's arm clamps across his chest, yanking him backwards and holding him firmly in place. "Harvey— _Harvey_!"

"Why do you always go for the joints?" Harvey grits out through his teeth. Arthur screams as his left leg peels open like a blooming flower, flesh-and-muscle petals falling wetly onto the sand.

"Why do you always go for the sick horror movies?" Arthur retorts. He glowers at the air above Harvey's head until a noxious green cloud forms and starts to drip smoking green acid.

"You have some _serious_ psychological issues, you know that?" A boulder topples down from nowhere and pins Arthur's lower half to the ground with a gruesome crunch.

"At least I know who I got them from!" Red ants with pincers larger than their heads swarm over Harvey's chest.

"God, you're such a _bitch!_ " Searing fire.

"Asshole!" Scalding water.

"Retard!"

"Douchebag!"

"Jerk!"

"Dumbass!"

" _Enough!_ " Mike's shout shakes the firmament, cracking the sky above their heads so deeply that the black light of Arthur's unconscious starts to shine through. Both brothers whip around to stare at him, Arthur's eyes wide, Harvey's narrow. Then—

"Sorry, Mike," Harvey says. "I need you to sit this one out."

\-- -- --

Mike wakes up with a yell, clutching his chest where the bullet gouged a path straight through from sternum to spine. He gasps at the ceiling for a few moments, free hand white-knuckled on the lounge chair's armrest, before he sits up. Arthur is still asleep in his own chair, but Harvey is now stretched out on the floor at his feet, a sofa cushion propping up his head.

Mike considers just yanking the needles out of their arms, hauling them back up to wakefulness while the last of the Somnacin drips out onto the floor, but he doesn't know for sure what effect that could have on their minds. And he definitely wants Harvey operating at full capacity for their next conversation.

So he gets up, stretching a bit to work out the kinks from sleeping half the week in Pearson Hardman's file room and half in an – admittedly cushy – hotel chair. He turns on the television. He orders room service.

And he waits.

\-- -- --

Eames isn't sure what he's expecting to see when he comes back to the hotel. Arthur waiting for him. Room service. A visiting troupe of cabana boys, while he's at it.

The door opens easily under his keycard (and Eames will never get used to actually using a keycard to get into a hotel room). He steps inside and surveys the scene before him with raised eyebrows.

"Well," he says. "I suppose two out of three isn't bad."

"Cruph samffch?" Mike offers, gesturing to the table of covered plates.

"Beg pardon?"

Mike swallows hugely, and tries again.

"Club sandwich? They're really good; I got turkey and roast beef, since they had both. There's also French onion soup, clam chowder, apple and goat cheese salad—"

"Steak and eggs?"

Mike grins.

"Door number three, sir." He leans over to lift the cover off a plate halfway across the table, revealing four golden, wobbly sunny-side-up eggs and a pile of seasoned steak tips. Even from the other end of the room, the smell is enough to make Eames's mouth water.

"I _knew_ you were a good pick," he says happily, grabs a chair, and sets to.

\-- -- --

Arthur and Harvey start to stir just as Eames stuffs the last vegetable pakora in his mouth and turns a regretful eye on the still-untouched stack of peshwari naan. Mike's probably put away twice as much food as he has, but even his fingers only barely twitch toward the dragon rolls before he subsides with a groan.

"Did you know that the brain, by itself, consumes about four hundred calories a day just from normal thinking activity?" Eames tells Mike, keeping a wary eye on Arthur as he unhooks himself from the PASIV and rubs his eyes. "Imagine how accelerated that consumption becomes when you're consciously processing things at dream speed."

"It's not a linear relationship," is all Arthur gets out before falling on the table of food like he hasn't eaten in a week.

"Whatever you say, darling." Eames winks at Mike. "Good instincts with the room service. That's the longest you've ever been under, isn't it? I remember one job we had – it was the last time we worked with Cobb, actually – when—"

"Shut. Up." Eames sees Mike startle violently as Harvey's lands a hand on his shoulder and hauls him up out of his chair. "It's the longest he'll ever _be_ under, Eames."

"Oh, now don't be ridiculous, you booted him out after, what, four and a half hours, dream time? And we'll need to budget at least ten for the job, preferably twelve if Mike can hold off Guildenstern's projections that long."

"He can," is Arthur's contribution, which he surfaces just long enough to make before diving back into a bowl of shrimp lo mein as big as his head.

"He won't," is Harvey's. "Come on. We're leaving."

"But Harvey—"

"Mike!"

Upon which Mike, to Eames's utter and eternal lack of surprise, practically springs to his feet and, with barely a glance over his shoulder, follows Harvey out of the room like a puppy at heel.

A naughty, droop-tailed, wide-eyed—

"No, Eames," Arthur says, with a quirk of his mouth, as the door clicks shut behind them.

"No what?" Eames manages to sound affronted.

"No, we cannot do any puppy play until the job is done."

"Awwww." Eames gives an exaggerated sigh just to see Arthur's quiet chuckle and gets up to drag the sofa over to Arthur's side of the table. "Come on, up up up," he chivvies, until Arthur stands and lets Eames arrange the sofa, the table, and Arthur into an optimal configuration to satisfy both of their psychological and physical needs.

"You could have just said you wanted to cuddle while I ate," Arthur points out.

"You've never let me 'cuddle' you in our entire lives," Eames points out right back. Arthur snorts indelicately, and promptly chokes as a piece of noodle flies up his nose.

"Ow, ow, _fuck_ ," he complains, until he's finally blown into enough tissues to expel it.

"Please, that can't possibly be the worst you've gone through today." Eames tries to keep his tone light, but when Arthur cuts him a sharp look anyway, he decides to stop beating around the bush. "I know how you and Harvey are. And I haven't forgotten the last time the two of you were under together alone."

"That was two years ago!"

"Precisely."

Arthur's mouth twists downward, sour and a little wry.

"He dropped a boulder on me," he confesses at last. "And that was before Mike left." Eames's arm tightens around Arthur as he resists the urge to go find Harvey and show him what a dreamer with some _real_ imagination can do – and Arthur, wonder of wonders, curls closer toward him, resting his head on the curve of Eames's shoulder with a soft grumble. "He also peeled my leg open to the bone, doused me in boiling water, and screamed at me until he forgot he didn't have to be hoarse about how he wasn't going to let dreams take away everyone he loved."

This time, Eames does start to get up. Arthur sits him right back down with a nibbling kiss to the throat that has him sinking back down into the cushions even as he swears at Arthur's underhanded tactics.

"To be fair," Arthur adds, "today was the first time I told Harvey exactly what I thought about him…retiring."

"Quitting." Eames says fiercely. "Abandoning us. Abandoning _you_."

"Not like Cobb needed two of us clinging to him after Mal died." Arthur shrugs minutely. Eames can already see him starting to rebuild his familiar armor, three-piece and spit-shined and perfectly pressed. "Besides," he shoots Eames a sly look, "where would you have been if Cobb had had a dedicated forger on call?"

"Running my own team back in Mother England, of course. Though we'd take the occasional job in the States. For the sake of old friends, you see. And for the money, because we'd make absolutely _obscene_ amounts of money. I'd work with a brilliant Egyptian chemist and," Eames ducks his head, nosing along the ridge of Arthur's cheek, "I'd have an irascible, American point man of my very own."

" _Irascible?_ "

"Yusuf got me a word-a-day calendar for Christmas. Said something about you and shacking up." Eames makes a terrible face. "And specificity."

And Arthur laughs, and bites him on the chin.

\-- -- --

"I was eating that!" Mike complains, as Harvey all but shoves him into the elevator and stabs the button for the lobby.

"Even dreaming doesn't take that much energy." Harvey can't help his hands from curling around the elevator railing, white-knuckled and tight with tension. "What the _hell_ were you thinking?"

"You already asked me that," Mike says petulantly.

"Well, I'm asking again!"

"Fine! Eames told me that—" Mike pauses, licks his lips. "—that you, and Arthur, were going to be in big trouble. Soon. Unless I helped you."

A hysterical laugh bubbles up in Harvey's throat. He wheezes, choking it down, and fixes the blinking elevator numbers with an incredulous stare because he doesn't think he can bring himself to look at Mike right now.

"You thought you were going to _save me_?"

"I—"

"What, like you saved Trevor from his drug lord buddies? My god, your hero complex is astounding."

" _My_ —"

Harvey cuts Mike off with a shove between his shoulder blades and drives him out into the hotel lobby. Ray has the town car pulled up outside; he's talking to someone on the phone, but as soon as he spots Harvey he hangs up and is back in the car in a flash, whipping them out into traffic with the familiar squeal of rubber on asphalt.

Full dark comes early to New York in October, and it's fallen while Harvey was in the dream. The streets zip past in heavy silence and the blur of streetlights, and not for the first time Harvey is grateful for Ray's uncanny ability to know when Harvey's not in the mood even for the blues. Mike is unnaturally quiet as well, leaning his head on the cool glass of the window and staring out, his face soft and expressionless.

It's not until they're inside the Pearson Hardman building and halfway to Harvey's office that Mike suddenly shakes himself and comes out of his short daze.

"…why are we at the office?" he says. "Are you—oh my god, are you firing me? Do we have to come to the office to fire me? Oh my _god_ , Harvey, no, please don't—"

"Don't you think you've talked yourself into a deep enough hole already?"

"I was only trying to help you!" Mike finally explodes. "All I ever do is try to _help you!_ "

"Looks like you didn't learn anything from the puppy analogy, then, did you?" Harvey snaps. "Donna!"

"Right here, Harvey." Mike whips around, eyes comically wide, as Donna shuts Harvey's office door behind her and starts pulling down the floor-to-ceiling blinds. A large, matte-black briefcase is in her hand. She plunks it down on the coffee table by the sofa, but instead of opening it, she looks at Harvey. "Are you sure you—"

"No, I’m not." Harvey cuts her off. "But I don't exactly have a lot of other options." He's fairly sure she wants to say something – but she won't. Not yet. Not with Mike in the room, his gaze flicking between the two of them, alternately mutinous and bewildered.

At last, Donna lets go of the briefcase and straightens, striding in stocking feet over to Harvey's desk and sitting down in his office chair like a queen settling onto her throne.

"Do what you have to do," she says, and crosses her arms over her chest.

As Harvey kneels to open the briefcase, Mike whispers, "Does she really—"

"You don't get to ask that question."

The locks click open all too easily under Harvey's deft touch, and the lid flips backward to reveal the familiar sight of his…of his _and Arthur's_ …

"Is that a PASIV?"

"The PASIV always belonged Dom…to Mal, really. This is the SSSSH – Small-Scale Scheduled Somnacin Hypo," Harvey explains. "It was ours. Arthur named it." He smiles, small and quiet. "He always liked Bones better than Kirk."

Mike swallows audibly. "You guys were…kind of deep into it, I take it."

"You could say that." Harvey holds out one of the needles to Mike. "Drag that chair over here; I get the sofa this time."

Mike obeys, then takes the needle – but rather than slip it into his arm, he just sits there, staring at it and at Harvey in turns.

"Why are we going under?" he asks at last, voice rasping against the darkness of the unlit office.

"Because I've got a feeling that in the whole time you've been working for them, Arthur and Eames never really told you what you were getting into."

"What? That's ridiculous," Mike scoffs. "Harvey, seriously, it's a _dream_. It's not real. Nothing can actually happen to—"

"Think very carefully about what you're about to say." Harvey focuses on the task of prepping and unspooling his own Somnacin line, because there's a cold, hard knot in his chest that he thought he'd worked through a long time ago, and if he loses hold of it now he knows the explosion will damage him and Mike both. Maybe beyond repair. When he looks up, Mike is staring at him with, for the first time, something like fear in his expression.

"Two hours, dream time," Harvey says, and lies back.

"Isn't that a little short?"

"Trust me." Harvey watches Mike slip the needle into his arm, follows suit, and reaches for the center button. "It's all the time you'll want."

\-- -- --

"Hey!" Harvey snaps his fingers at Mike, who's standing on the other side of the desk with a stack of file folders in his hand and a distant look on his face. "You'd better be here because you have something on Rosencrantz for me." Mike starts, then focuses on Harvey and shakes himself a little.

"Yeah. Sorry, I was a little—"

"Noticed, don’t care, what did you find?"

"Morgan Rosencrantz was _definitely_ having an affair." Mike says. "The PI's analysis of his bank records and credit card statements shows a steady, escalating pattern of flowers, jewelry, dinners…up until about six months ago, when it all stopped."

"What, so he broke it off?"

"Nope. Not yet." Mike grins. "Over the past six months, the average size and frequency of his cash withdrawals has more than doubled. He got wise to the fact that his wife might be on to him, so he switched to a less obvious strategy."

"Okay." Harvey shrugs, twirls his pen. "Anything else?"

"I knew you were going to say that!" Mike crows, throwing his arms out. "Which is why I saved the best for last. There was a Tiffany bag under Rosencrantz's desk when we visited, and when he gave you his card, I saw a receipt in his wallet for an $8,500 diamond bracelet. The only bracelet like that that Tiffany currently carries is the 1.37 carat weight Tiffany Legacy, and the only person we've seen _wearing_ a Legacy bracelet is—"

He cuts off suddenly, frowning.

"Have I already told you this?"

"Harvey?" Donna pokes her head in the door. "Your two o'clock is on line one."

"Got it." Harvey motions at Mike to sit on the sofa and work. Just before his call engages, he hears Donna say,

"You know, Mike, it wasn't your fault that Trevor started dealing drugs. You couldn't have kept him from getting involved, and you couldn't have stopped him once he did."

Mike frowns minutely, but his face clears almost immediately and he resumes clicking away at his laptop.

Harvey blithers around on the phone, letting Mike get absorbed in his work. Rachel stops by to drop off some files. Harvey tenses, waiting for her to speak—but then she pats Mike on the head and smiles.

"Not everyone values you solely for your intelligence," she tells him. "No one who matters, anyway. You're so much more than a human encyclopedia."

This time Mike's frown lasts longer, but Rachel whisks out the door just as he opens his mouth to speak.

Harvey hangs up the phone. Loudly.

"Short call?" Mike looks up, curious. Harvey smiles.

"You've been working for an hour and a half."

"What?" Mike looks from Harvey to his papers and back. "No way, I've only read like two pa—wait a minute." His eyes narrow. "We're in a dream, aren't we?"

"What makes you say that?"

"Lost time, lack of detail…"

"What lack of detail?"

"Well, the records on the shelf are…all…there…" Mike trails off as he pulls a few out of their sleeves and stares at the timeworn labels, detailing songs and copyrights and the names of long-dead studio execs. "But they probably don't have any music on them!" Mike all but bounds across the office and pops it onto the record player, carefully setting the needle in place; Harvey can't help his amusement at Mike's crestfallen expression when _Won't Be a Fool No More_ tootles out cheerfully from the speakers.

"The view…?" Harvey prompts, because yes, he admits it, he can sometimes be a bastard.

"The view!" Mike's perks up and darts over to peer through the gleaming glass. "…is…crystal clear…" He turns to Harvey, and now he looks nervous. "This isn't a dream?"

"Oh, it's a dream." Harvey leans back in his chair and laces his fingers behind his head. "Or at least, you seem pretty convinced it must be."

It's possible that he's a bastard more often than '"sometimes."

"Hang on!" Mike holds up a triumphant finger. "If this is a dream, then I can change it – doesn't matter what it was initially built like. So I can just—" He points at the sky outside the window and screws up his face a bit.

It remains the same cloudless blue it was on May 12, 1998: the day Harvey pitched his last, perfect game against Florida State.

Mike frowns, and points again—and again—and again—

And sits down heavily, straight on the floor of Harvey's office.

"What the hell?" he whispers.

Harvey stands and walks around the desk to sit beside him, rests a hand on Mike's shoulder.

"It's a dream," he says firmly. Mike turns toward him, looking lost.

"How do you know?"

"My totem." Harvey pulls the battered playing card from the inner pocket of his waistcoat, carefully so that neither he nor Mike can see its face. "If this is a dream, the card will be…the Jack of Hearts," he predicts, and turns it over.

Jack of Hearts.

Mike wrinkles his nose. "That's not exactly conclusive."

"All right." Harvey turns the card back down and then over again.

"Two of Clubs."

Again.

"Seven of Spades."

Again.

"Four—"

"Three of diamonds," Mike interrupts. Harvey shakes his head.

"Doesn't work like that. This is _my_ totem."

"Or a really good card trick."

"All I'm doing is turning my wrist. No tricks here." Harvey shrugs and tucks the card away. "You don't have to believe me. We'll wake up soon." He shoots Mike a sideways glance. "Probably."

When the dream starts to slip away, a few minutes later, Harvey thinks he's never been so relieved.

\-- -- --

Mike's eyes snap open, and with an audible gasp he drags the Somnacin needle out of his arm and is halfway across the room before Harvey's even sat up fully.

"Problem?" Harvey asks, and there's more bitterness in his tone than he would have liked. Even if Mike probably deserves most of it.

"Is this—are we—" Mike is faltering, on the brink of free-fall. Harvey knows he has to act fast.

"Mike. Look at me." He catches Mike with his back to the window, careful to slot himself between Mike and Donna, who's sitting still as a mouse and studiously ignoring them. "It's okay. You're awake. You're not dreaming."

"How." Mike's eyes are wide, his voice something less than a whisper. " _How_."

Harvey pulls his totem out of his pocket, shows Mike the red-embossed back of it.

"This is my totem," he says. "Remember my totem?"

Mike nods.

"Five of Spades."

Harvey turns the card around, shows Mike the blank, white face of it.

"See? It only, ever looks like this in the real world." He rests his forehead against Mike's, hands cupping Mike's shaking shoulders. "You're awake. I promise."

Slowly, slowly, Mike calms, breath puffing soft and steady against Harvey's lips.

"The heck with it," he says at last, the barest, half-hysterical sliver of humor in his voice. "If this is a dream, I don't think I want to wake up."

Harvey pulls back and rolls his eyes, smacks Mike on the arm.

"Ow!"

"Oh, suck it up, you deserved that." Harvey steps aside, still keeping himself between Mike and Donna. "Think you can make it home by yourself? Don't take the bike, I'll call you a cab. Do you need money?"

"I can call my own cab!" Mike says, prickling back into familiar indignation just as Harvey knew he would. "And pay for it, I'm not completely incompetent—"

"All right!" Harvey forces a laugh and holds up his hands in surrender. "Go, get some rest. I'll see you on Monday. Don’t be late."

And Mike, naturally, makes a face, sticks out his tongue, and goes.

\-- -- --

Donna's been going for drinks with Harvey Specter since her senior year of college – over fifteen years, now, though she's never met anyone with the balls to guess it's more than ten. They go to O'Malley's when there's something to celebrate, and the Blue Note when they want somewhere to drink down their frustrations. The Lounge on 22nd St. is for when they've both gone too long without a date; Zizigo for when they don't want anything that's not blue, pink, or obscenely named. Donegal is for baseball, Sing Sing for karaoke.

They've only ever gone back to The Green Dragon twice, since the night Donna-as-Eowyn spilled her Avada Kedavra all over Captain Kirk's 100% Authentic Starfleet uniform and met her lifelong brother, beloved, and sassy gay (well, bi, but who's counting) friend.

The first time was eight years ago, when Donna showed up at Harvey's apartment stinking of sex, tears, and cheap whiskey, and told him in a hollow voice that her youngest brother had been killed by an IED, five days and five and a half thousand miles from home. The second was two years ago, when Harvey had quit dreaming and returned the favor.

Donna has to admit that one way or another, if there was going to be a third time, it was always going to be because of Mike Ross.

" 'S my subconscious security," Harvey says, staring into the depths of his fourth – fifth? – neat bourbon. "It…didn't security, you know?"

"Nope." Donna rests her cheek on her palm and takes another sip of her Derby, because she, like Harvey, understands that bourbon is indeed the only thing to drink at times like these. "I don't. And security is not a verb."

Harvey glowers.

"You were supposed to delve into the unconquered depths of his psyche." he says accusingly. "Latch onto his subconscious guilt and fear and twist at them with—with nature red in tooth and claw, until he woke up screaming. And you told him it _wasn't his fault_."

"Then clearly it wasn't," is Donna's sage contribution.

"Obviously!" Harvey's shout turns heads across the bar. He winces, waves apologetically, and whispers, " _Obviously._ But that's not the point! The point is to get the bad guys out of my head, not help them resolve the deep-seated and festering psychological issues that probably got them into the profession in the first place."

"Mike isn't a bad guy." Donna uses small words to make sure Harvey understands, because he's an unnaturally coherent drunk and too good at faking it for his own good. Harvey grumbles something into the last of his bourbon and signals for another. "Sorry, didn't catch that."

"Said, yes he is," Harvey repeats. "Bad…evil…thingy. Mastermind. Hatching nefarious plans to make me blither like a love struck fool until I divulge Pearson Hardman's darkest secrets."

Donna has to bite the inside of her cheek to keep from laughing. "Pretty sure he already knows most of them," she points out. "He's had to hang out with Louis an awful lot."

"Don't remind me," Harvey growls, and drains his bourbon. Again. Donna blinks.

"You don’t think—"

"He'd better not have." Harvey pokes her in the nose, which would be a remarkable feat of coordination if she didn't know he'd been aiming for her chest. "Did you know Louis doesn't wear a towel in the club locker room? That's…'s indecent, 's what it is, what if he made Mike not wear one either? _What if Louis has seen Mike without a towel?_ "

"I'm sure Mike kept his towel on the entire time," Donna says soothingly, petting Harvey's hair a little. He looks up at her through his eyelashes, a distinct downward turn to his lips.

"You think?"

Donna nods.

"…I'll call him!" Harvey decides, and starts rummaging around in his suit jacket. "It's midnight, he's my associate, I can do what I want."

"Thor."

"Huh?"

"Never mind," Donna laughs, and finishes off her Derby.

"Mike!" Harvey says loudly. "Can you hear me?" Mike's sleep-slurred grumble is tinny through the speakers. "I have a question for you, I'm coming over!"

_"Wha—wai, Harvey—"_

"Great! See you in a minute!" Harvey shouts cheerfully, and starts peering out the window, trying to spot a cab.

Donna sits back, smiles, and very, very carefully, does absolutely nothing to stop him.

\-- -- --

Mike flails his way out of bed with a groan at the sound of someone pounding on his door. He knows from experience that if he doesn't answer quickly, Mrs. Simmons next door _will_ , and in the morning he'll have several irritated calls from the building manager on his voicemail. And possibly one from the police, as well.

"Ow, _shit_. I'm coming!" he yells, swearing when he stubs his toe on the coffee table. It takes a few moments to unbolt the door, but eventually he hauls it open. "What?"

"I need to talk to you. Now." Harvey's voice is low and intense. He sounds just like he did back at the office, with his hands all over Mike, and Mike can't help the way his stomach flutters at the memory.

"I—okay," he says, and steps aside to let Harvey into the apartment. Mike pushes the door closed behind them, and when he turns around, Harvey’s so close Mike nearly smacks into his chest.

"I have a question. It's very important."

"Yeah…yeah, you said. On the phone." Mike swallows and tries to rub some of the sleep out of his eyes. "Um—what?"

Harvey grips his shoulders tightly. "Has Louis ever seen you without your towel on?"

" _What?_ "

"Has he?" Harvey repeats urgently.

"No!" Mike tries desperately to break out of Harvey's grip, his face burning. "I—no! Of course not!"

"Good," Harvey says, and clamps his mouth over Mike's.

It shouldn't be so hot. It _shouldn't_ , because Mike isn't expecting it, and his mouth is cottony and gross from sleep, and Harvey's lips are too dry, and Mike can taste the bitterness of expensive bourbon in his mouth. But Harvey is plastered against him from chest to knees, his tongue soft against Mike's teeth and Mike's cock already half-hard against his hip, and Mike would have to be crazy not to love every second of it.

The bourbon is…more than a faint bitterness, Mike realizes, as Harvey tries to press deeper into him. It's a burn, heat and oak and caramelized sugar, strong enough to make Mike wonder if you can get secondhand drunk, and—

"Oof!" Mike staggers as Harvey sags against him, his mouth slipping away from Mike's and leaving a faint smear of their saliva on his cheek. "Harvey?"

A faint snore is the only answer he gets.

"…oh, you bastard. You are _so_ sleeping on the couch tonight."

\-- -- --

Mike wakes to the smell of fresh coffee, eggs, and bacon – which is odd, because Jenny can't cook for beans, and he's pretty sure no one else has a key to his apartment. He staggers upright, and yelps as he nearly topples off the sofa.

That's when the previous night comes rushing back: Harvey's visit, Harvey's _kiss_ …Mike putting Harvey to bed on the sofa, and apparently nodding off right on top of him. Mike cringes and brackets the question of how Harvey reacted when he woke up, in favor of pulling a blanket out of the nest around him and padding into the kitchen to investigate.

"Scrambled, sunny side up, or omelet?" Harvey asks, half-turning to shoot Mike a tiny smile. His hair is in chaos, falling in twisted locks into his eyes and sticking almost straight up in back where he was sleeping on it.

"Which goes best with a raging hangover?" Mike walks straight past him, making a beeline for the coffee; when he retreats with a steaming mug of it, he makes sure to put the table between himself and Harvey. Harvey twitches.

"Don't have one. Wasn't that drunk."

"You fell asleep with your tongue in my mouth!" Mike snaps. "And that was _after_ you barged into my dreamscape, put me through, frankly, one of the most terrifying experiences of my life, threw me out of your office, and then showed up plastered on my doorstep at one in the morning!"

"Maybe if you'd have been a little more careful about your safety, I wouldn't have had to!"

"Oh, because getting drunk has _so much to do_ with—"

"No, but keeping you the hell away from my brother does—"

"You are such an arrogant, self-important—"

"—childish, _naïve_ —"

Mike's fist cracks hard across Harvey's jaw. Harvey's head snaps to the side, blood blooming bright at the corner of his mouth where he's cut his lip on his teeth.

"Oh, shit," Mike breathes. "Shit, oh my god, Harvey, I'm sorry—"

"It's fine," Harvey grunts, straightening with a wince and wiping the blood off on his bare wrist. "Ice pack?" Mike fumbles for the freezer and thrusts one at Harvey, who wraps it in paper towels from the counter and holds it to his jaw.

"Harvey, seriously, oh my _mmph!_ "

Harvey puts his hand firmly over Mike's mouth. "It's. Fine."

Mike is quiet. Then—

"Mmch mm?"

"What?" Harvey removes his hand and presses the ice pack down more firmly.

"Punch me," Mike repeats in a small voice. Harvey goggles. "Come on, this is how it works! I hit you, you hit me, we're even. Right?" Mike adds, half-pleading.

"Better idea," Harvey growls, tosses the ice pack in the sink, and hauls Mike forward.

This time, Harvey tastes like salt and copper – from the blood, Mike realizes – but the sharp tang quickly fades as Harvey pushes his tongue between Mike's teeth. He must have brushed his teeth at some point, because there's a trace of mint mingled into the taste of him. Mike chases after it, groaning eagerly when Harvey's arm curves around his waist and he grabs a shameless handful of Mike's ass. He runs his fingers through the slept-on wreck of Harvey's hairstyle and gets a moan of pleasure as his blunt fingernails scratch over Harvey's scalp.

Mike whines a little when Harvey finally pulls away, because damn it, that's the second time in less than twelve hours that Harvey's been the one to put the brakes on. Admittedly, the first time wasn't entirely Harvey's fault – except for the part where it _totally was_ , because Harvey's the one who got so drunk he couldn't even stay awake long enough to explain to Mike _why the hell he had kissed him_.

"I thought the 'why' would be kind of obvious," Harvey smirks, which is when Mike realizes he's been talking out loud. But—

"Not to me," Mike complains. "Seriously, when were you planning on telling me guys were even on your radar?"

Harvey shuts his eyes. "I'm sorry." The tip of his nose is cold against the skin behind Mike's ear, his lips hot on Mike's neck. "I was…scared." Mike's collarbone. "I've seen dreams drive men…people…crazy." The underside of Mike's jaw. "It scared the hell out of me. And I didn't want to see it happen to you." He finishes with a kiss to Mike's forehead that leaves Mike blinking and bewildered.

"I'm confused."

Huh. Mike's never actually seen anyone facepalm in real life, before.

"I like you. A lot. I want to date you, and I don't want you to lose your mind." Harvey says crisply, backing away a bit. "There, all one-syllable words, should be very easy to process."

"Yeah, yeah, mock the genius," Mike grumbles—and reels him back in.

\-- -- --

The next week is the most hellacious week of Mike's life. Well, after the week his parents died. And the week he got kicked out of college. And the week he realized he really did have to move Gram to a full-care facility. And okay, maybe it’s not the most hellacious week after all, but it is definitely a damn hard week. In every sense of the word, and Mike defies anyone who has ever been _this close_ to having sex with a man like Harvey to tell him different.

"Not until after the job," Harvey says, for the thousandth impossibly patient time, peeling himself regretfully off of Mike after another round of necking like teenagers on his office sofa.

"But why _not_?" Mike is long past the stage where he's ashamed of whining.

"It goes against my policy."

"What policy?"

"My no-sex-until-after-the-job policy."

"I can't believe you have a policy for that," Mike complains. "How can having sex make that much of a difference?"

"The mind is a mysterious thing," Harvey intones. "You never knew Mal and Dom, and you didn't meet Arthur and Eames until after they got together, but trust me – this is not the kind of mental dynamic you want to screw with right before an extraction. Arthur and Eames were out of commission for almost six months after they started sleeping together. Although some of that was probably because they danced around it for so damn long…"

"Come on, not even a hand job?" Mike wheedles.

"I already told you: no clothes off, no hands below the equator, and absolutely no _anything_ anywhere we have real privacy. What do you think, does that cover hand jobs?"

"I'm going to make your life hell," Mike promises fervently, before dragging Harvey back for one last, hard kiss and heaving himself off the sofa.

"You already are," he hears Harvey mutter, as the office door swings shut behind him.

\-- -- --

Saturday dawns grey and rainy, for which Eames is grateful. Guildenstern has a tendency to stay in her penthouse flat on days like these, half-dozing in a nest of blankets in her lounge and nibbling at some of the delicacies her newer lovers ply her with. Eames is almost envious; it's the sort of life he'd envisioned leading, before he met Mal Cobb and learned there were better ways to turn a profit from a…natural talent with people.

"Time?" Arthur says, pushing the remains of their breakfast cart out into the hallway and shutting the door behind him.

"Four hours until Harvey and Mike come to pick us up, call it half an hour to get to Guildenstern's with the extra traffic, and another ten to check in with Morrison on the surveillance. Could be up to two hours before we get our entry window but unlikely to be more than one, another hour to do the job itself, and then we'll be eating dinner at the airport with plenty of time before our flight."

"You'd better be right," Arthur warns. "I'm not missing Hawaii again."

\-- -- --

In fact, they end up waiting almost an hour and a half for Guildenstern to nod off enough that Morrison, peering in with his high-powered binoculars from a rooftop across the street, gives them the go-ahead. Arthur claps the man on the shoulder, slips a few bonus hundreds into his shirt pocket, and bolts down to the lobby to alert the others.

"—so then, he buys the horse a prostitute!" Eames crows, as beside him Mike practically howls with laughter. Harvey is, surprisingly, sitting on the other side of the room – and unsurprisingly glaring at his Forbes Magazine so hard it should be bursting into flames.

"Come on," Arthur says from the doorway. "We're up."

"Finally!" Eames bounds to his feet, snags the PASIV from under his chair, and shoots a bright grin at Mike. "You ready, love?"

"Ready as I'll ever be," Mike grins back. He hesitates, though, as Eames trots out of the room after Arthur. Harvey, too, rises more sedately, straightening his tie and waistcoat and rebuttoning his jacket. He catches Mike with an arm around the waist as he passes, drawing him tight to his side while Eames and Arthur faux-bicker their way across the street into Guildenstern's building.

"Showtime," he murmurs into Mike's ear as they follow a few yards behind, still pressed closely together. Harvey keeps him there all the way through Guildenstern's lobby, running his palm soothingly along Mike's flank until the elevator doors ping shut behind them. Then Mike shoots a wary glance up at Harvey and pulls away a little.

"Aren't we kind of...drawing attention to ourselves?" he asks. Harvey snorts.

"After the show Eames and my brother put on? Not a chance. Besides," he adds, with a glance at the security camera followed by a discreet squeeze of Mike's ass, "you could use the reminder of what's waiting on the other side of this hour."

"Twelve hours," Mike murmurs, then yelps – this time, the squeeze was more of a pinch.

"Hour. Singular." Harvey repeats, and hustles Mike out the opening doors with a sharp swat to his bottom and a wicked grin. "And then we're going to have _such_ a good time."

\-- -- --

Harvey Specter, private eye, leans back on two legs of his chair, feet kicked up on top of the yellowing papers scattered over his tilting desk. A half-smoked cigarette dangles between his lips, a fresh one tucked into the brim of his battered fedora.

"What makes you think you can pull this off, Eamesie?" he asks the skinny blonde seated across from him. She's a shade too skinny, actually – her dress hangs where it should cling, droops where it should swell, and her impressive rack is a little less impressive once you notice the cheap padding in her _brassiere_. Her makeup is more greasepaint than Garnier, and it can't fully conceal the bags under her eyes, the thinness of her lips. Still, Harvey doesn't doubt she can land enough marks to keep her in fresh flowers and chalky chocolates until the day she dies – at the rate Eamesie's going, it won't be five years before it's her pretty face staring up at Harvey from a blood-spattered crime scene photograph. God knows the police won't waste too much time on her. Harvey will, though. Waste every minute it takes, even if in the end he can't do anything more than shoot the bastard in the back in a black alleyway, without ever getting to tell him why.

Harvey is a gentleman like that.

"Come on, love," Eamesie begs, the barest trace of her London birthright in her voice. She used to have some sob story about being a proper Lady before the war, though Harvey doubts she's used it in years. Brooklyn's left too much of its mark on her, in her flattened r's and her wildly diphthonging vowels. "Your man's lookin' for a bit of class, isn't he? Something he could parade along Broadway without getting the wrong sort of looks from the right sort of people, if only he wasn't already hitched to such a hag. Ain't no one in the city does class better than old Eamesie, you know that."

For a moment, Harvey even considers it. But he's got his own skin and stomach to look out for, and his belt is already more notch than leather.

"Sorry, Eamesie." He stands, and ushers her out the half-open door into the room where Guildenstern is seated on a rickety chair (the last one Harvey's got left), probably having overheard their entire conversation. "I'm not sure that's true anymore."

Eamesie shoots Guildenstern a hooded, poisonous look, but she settles her dignity and her threadbare stole around her shoulders and leaves without another word.

"Miss Guildenstern, I presume?" Harvey steps forward and offers his hand. "Harvey Specter, private investigator."

"I know," Guildenstern says, clipped short and Manhattan-quick. "Wouldn't be here if I didn't. Hear you have a job for a classy dame?"

"Hear you're a classy dame looking for a job," Harvey shoots back. "Come on. We can talk in my office."

\-- -- --

"I thought you said her sub security would be shit!" Mike yells, scrambling after Arthur as they leap off yet another Penrose staircase. He seals it behind them, trapping a dozen projections inside the paradox, but there seem to be dozens more where they came from.

"I said it wouldn't be as good as mine!" Arthur yells back, half-turning to blast his machine gun behind them and splatter the narrow alley with crimson. "Looks like she prefers force to finesse. How many loops do you have going?"

"Fifty," Mike says tightly, "but I've already filled up a whole internal level with the overspill. You're lucky I read [Mandelbrot](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ce/Mandelbrot_zoom.gif) in college," he adds, shooting Arthur a grim smile. Arthur scoffs.

"You never read Mandelbrot in college."

"Yeah, you're right. I was done with him by the end of high school."

Arthur's laugh cuts short with a choking gasp, and Mike glances over to see a swift-spreading red stain creep out from under Arthur's waistcoat and across the white cotton of his shirt.

"Oh, _hell,_ " Arthur says. "Sorry, Mike."

Then he vanishes.

Mike only has a few moments to spare before Guildenstern's projections start to close in on him. He spends them staring, paralyzed, at the spot where Arthur was, just a moment ago, before the crack of a bullet against the brick wall by his head startles him out of his daze.

"Hurry up, Harvey," he whispers, and starts running.

\-- -- --

"This is certainly an impressive portfolio," Harvey says slowly, scanning the reams of photographs Guildenstern has laid out for him. Politicians, foreign dignitaries, businessmen…every one of them strategically, crucially married, and every one of them sprawled over his desk in black-and-white glory that would make Bettie Page blush. "But how do I know your files are secure?"

"You think I'd still have half of those if they weren't?" Guildenstern does affronted well, Harvey has to give her that.

"For all I know, you might be missing half of them," he shoots back. "You gotta give me something to work with. How about this guy?" He stabs a finger down seemingly at random, drags a frankly obscene snapshot of Rosencrantz out of the pile. "What kind of hold do you have on him?"

Guildenstern considers Harvey for a long moment, one red-lacquered nail tapping against her red-lacquered lips.

"You drive a hard bargain, Specter."

"Ain't the only thing hard about me, sweetheart." He leers, letting his gaze slip down to her cleavage for a moment before dragging his eyes back up to her face. He's too slow, of course; Guildenstern's already caught the not-so-covert glance, and relaxes. She thinks she's got something on him, too, now – or if she doesn't yet, she can get it easily enough.

With any luck, Harvey thinks, crossing his fingers under the desk, it'll be smooth sailing from here on out.

\-- -- --

Mike's head is throbbing. He's never been confused like this in his life – not really, anyway, not about things that matter. People, sure, people are complicated and irrational and do stupid things for stupid reasons, and Mike doesn't try very hard to pretend they make sense. He just smiles, and follows suit, and it's worked out pretty well so far.

But this? This is…this is what Billy Jones must have felt like in the fourth grade, Mike thinks, when they'd started studying polygons in math and Billy wouldn't stop wailing about how it was _all lines, just lines, there's no difference between 'em!_

Billy didn't stay in fourth grade math very long.

Mike hadn't thought very much of it; he was too busy with his homework, and Trevor's homework, and sometimes Jenny's homework, when Trevor could talk her into leaving it with Mike so they could go climb the trees in Central Park. Mike didn't mind, at the time. He liked homework, and he could do it way faster than Trevor and Jenny and still have plenty of time for tree climbing left over. Now, though, Mike thinks of Billy Jones for the first time in years, and swears that if he makes it out of this, the first thing he'll do (after he eats, and has sex with Harvey, and eats some more, and has really, mind-blowingly filthy sex with Harvey) is hunt down Billy Jones's address and write him a letter of commiseration.

"Layers, just layers, and no difference between them," Mike mutters. Then he claps his hands over his ears to drown out whoever said that, because they're wrong, they have to be wrong, or else Harvey is _screwed_.

\-- -- --

"Well?" Guildenstern is starting to look impatient. "Do we have a deal or not?" Harvey holds up one finger, finishes transcribing the last of her statement onto his tattered notepad, and looks up.

"Yes, ma'am," he says, and holds out a hand, tamping down hard on the triumph that wants to seep into his voice. "Yes, I believe we—"

_  
**BOOM**   
_

Harvey shouts and stumbles as the whole building – the whole _street_ – suddenly shakes like it's under cannon fire.

"Harvey!" Eames bursts into the room, back in his own shape. "You'd better be done in here, cos we need to go. _Now._ "

"Go where?" Guildenstern grabs Harvey's arm, clutching like a vulture. "What's going on? Mister Specter, please, you have to take me with you—"

Harvey shakes her off and turns away.

"Hey!" The click of a hammer being pulled back makes him turn. The little revolver is shaking in Guildenstern's hand. "I said, take me with you."

"Shit, lady…" Harvey laughs, low and soft. "You shoot me in a dream, you better wake up and apologize." He walks out the door without another word – and isn't surprised when she lets him go.

\-- -- --

"Arthur's already out," Eames tells Harvey, as they fly through the grey and crumbling streets. "I felt him go. Had an inkling something was wrong, so I started hunting around for Mike, but…"

"Get out."

"Excuse me?"

"Get. _Out_ ," Harvey snaps, ditching his fedora and pinstripes and pulling up a SWAT uniform, helmet and rifle slung over his shoulder. "Get Arthur, re-up the Somnacin doses, and make sure we and Guildenstern _stay under_. If I can find Mike, we should be able to keep from dropping into Limbo by piggybacking onto whatever dream bubbles up next from her subconscious."

"Harvey, you're taking a huge risk—"

"And unless you want me to start remembering just whose fault that is, _Eames_ , you're not going to make me say it again!"

Eames has always had a deep respect for Harvey Specter – as is due anyone who could survive having Arthur for a brother – but this is the first time he's understood why some people fear him.

\-- -- --

"God. _God._ " The second Eames vanishes, Harvey drops the intimidating act and rakes his fingers through his hair, eyes darting from crumbling buildings to rapidly rusting cars to the cracking pavement of the street itself as he tries to think of where the hell Mike could squirreled himself away. It wouldn't be anywhere within the usual scope of the dream, Harvey at least knows that much; the projections would have found him and shattered the whole thing long before it started to crumble on its own. Which means Mike has to be hiding in one of the spaces between, the seams that only he and Arthur would be able to see because they were the ones who stitched the dream together – and Arthur was long gone.

Harvey grits his teeth, slams his fist into the nearest wall in frustration. The impact ripples like a shockwave over the whole building, which collapses like a stomped-on sandcastle, and just for a second, Harvey catches a glimpse—

His lips pull back in a wide rictus, one that shows a few too many teeth to rightly be called a grin.

"Okay, Mike," he says. "Okay. I'm coming for you."

\-- -- --

Mike – is he Mike? Well, if he's not Mike, he supposes, he doesn't know who the hell he is, so he might as well be Mike. At least until he gets that figured out.

Mike is curled up, smaller than an angel dancing on the head of a pin, small as angels dancing in the spaces between atoms. Thoughts are smaller than atoms, after all – atoms are made up of protons and neutrons and electrons, and if a thought is the size of anything, it's the size of the tiniest vibrations of electrons that zip and zing whitely through the vast corridors of the brain.

…Mike thinks he might have to do some more research on biochemistry. He doesn't have time for that now, though. He has to remember the dream: the dream of the city, and the city at the edge of the city, and the city at the edge of the city at the edge of the city…

A hand lands on Mike's shoulder. He looks up sharply, and his mouth falls open.

" _Harvey?_ " he whispers. Harvey, he remembers. Mike, he's not so sure of, but he could never not remember Harvey. "How did you get here?"

"You'd be surprised how easy it is to tear a city apart, when you have the right motivation," Harvey says lightly. "Of course, it's even easier when you have an idiot genius holding together the underlying oneiric structure while you work. Which you can let go of now, by the way," he adds.

"Let go?"

"Yeah, Mike." Harvey sits down beside him, threads his fingers into Mike’s short-cropped hair. Mike leans into the touch, eyes fluttering shut with pleasure – but then the dream, the dreams, start to slip away, and he jerks back with a gasp. "Hey, no," Harvey soothes, pulling him in again. "That's good. You were doing so good, Mike. Go ahead, I got you. Let go."

"Let go…"

"Let go," Harvey murmurs. "I got you."

"…'kay," Mike says.

And lets go.

\-- -- --

"You can handle cleanup, right?" Harvey says quietly, flipping his totem over and over between his fingers. He glances over his shoulder at Mike, who has fortunately switched from the blank silence of his first few waking minutes to chattering happily away at Eames as they pack away the PASIV. "I want to get Mike home, in case he crashes."

Arthur scrutinizes him, head cocked, with the strangest expression on his face. Finally he nods.

"Not a problem. Beauty of modern technology; you miss one flight, they schedule you another."

"Thanks." Harvey steps forward, pulls his brother into a rough hug.

"Sorry I dragged you into this." Arthur's voice is so small it would have been easier for Harvey to pretend he didn't hear it at all. Instead, though, he just thwacks Arthur on the back of the head and hugs him a little tighter.

"If I remember correctly, I'm the one who dragged you into this," he says. "You know, because I'm five years older than you, and people tend to ask me about stuff before you, and all."

"Asshole."

"Bitch."

"Hey," Arthur says, as Harvey steps back. "Donna and I are going for drinks. First of the month. Zizigo?"

"I—you know what? Yeah." Harvey smiles. "Sure thing."

\-- -- --

"Har _veyyy,_ " Mike whines, as he's all but bodily thrown into Harvey's apartment, Harvey following hot on his heels. "I’m hungry!"

"It's New York," Harvey growls, yanking alternately at Mike's t-shirt and belt like he can't decide which to do away with first. "We can damn well _order in_." He settles on the shirt and hauls it up and over Mike's head, hurling it away like it's personally offended him and bending his head so he can lick over and around Mike's nipple.

" _Hnnngh!_ Yeah, okay, ordering good," Mike gasps, one hand fisted in Harvey's hair, the fingers of the other digging into the tight muscles of his back. He curls one leg around Harvey's waist and squeezes, as a warning; when Harvey grunts assent, Mike kicks the other up, too, so that he's completely wrapped around Harvey, all of his weight resting on the hard jut of Harvey's hips. Harvey doesn't even stagger – no mean feat, considering he can't have more than thirty pounds on Mike. He just holds him, leaning back a little so he can brace his own weight against the pull of Mike's.

"Hey," Harvey says, tipping his head back to smile up at Mike. "Hey. I got you."

Then Harvey is kissing him, lush and unashamed and already so familiar, and everything falls away into the too-close press of their bodies, chests and hips and the hot line of Harvey's cock pressing right up against the space between Mike's balls and his ass.

"Bed?" Mike manages, high and strangled, when Harvey finally lets him up for air.

"If you insist," Harvey grumbles. "What's your refractory period like?"

"How can you even use words like 'refractory' period right nnn _ohmygod_." Mike moans embarrassingly loudly when Harvey slams him back against the wall and worms a hand between their bodies, working open the fly of Mike's pants and wrapping his hand around Mike's dick. "Okay, you win, um, twenty minutes?" He moans again when Harvey latches onto his right nipple and starts sucking. "Fifteen if you keep that up, after—fuck, _fuck!_ " Mike shouts, and comes.

Actually, it takes Mike almost half an hour to recover – time that Harvey puts to good use by gleefully stripping Mike of every last stitch of clothing before he even starts on his own.

"Refractory period," Harvey says smugly, pushing a pillow under the arch of Mike's back to support his hips. "The period after your partner's orgasm during which he is too pliable to do anything but flail weakly as you arrange him in bed to your satisfaction."

"Hey! 'M not pliable," Mike protests.

"Prove it."

Mike flails weakly.

Harvey laughs. "Are you sure you're up for this?" He brandishes a sachet of lube and a condom pulled from the nightstand drawer. "Maybe I should just rub off against you tonight, you know, take it slow—"

"Hey!" Mike's indignation gives him the strength to struggle up onto his elbows. "You do that and I'll—I'll tell Louis you couldn't get it up!"

Harvey's eyes darken. "Oh, you're going to _pay_ for that." He rips open the sachet and squirts half of it out onto his fingers, catches one of Mike's thighs in the other hand and pushes forward until Mike's ass is perfectly, obscenely exposed. "But not tonight. Tonight," Harvey leans closer, coaxing Mike to stretch until his knee is pressed against his chest, "I'm just going to fuck you."

Mike shivers, full body, head dropping back onto the mattress as Harvey's first finger slips easily into him. Harvey makes a considering noise.

"Did I lie to Jessica when I told her you were a virgin?"

"I'm a tw—twenty-five year old bisexual man who lives in New York City," Mike gasps, squirming further down onto the invading digit. Harvey obligingly holds his hand still, crooking and twisting his finger against the roll of Mike's hips. "The hell do you think?"

"Well, I don't know, your parents could have been Mormons—"

"Oh my god, _shut up_ ," Mike chokes out, and shoves his hand down between his legs so he can wiggle his finger in beside Harvey's. He can tell the moment Harvey realizes what he's doing, because Harvey makes a sort of strangled sound, and his eyes go very wide, and then he's pushing two more fingers into Mike all at once, stretching Mike out so well he wonders faintly if he'll really be able to feel it when Harvey puts his cock in.

The answer to which, by the way, is _yes_. Wonderfully, perfectly, emphatically yes, and for once Mike just gets to lie back and let Harvey do all the work. His hands flit all over Mike's body, now clutching his hips, now gripping his thigh, now pinning his wrists to the mattress in a way, Mike thinks, they are _definitely_ going to have to explore later, the steady thrust of his hips driving his cock into Mike faster and faster, the occasional brush against his prostate setting sparks whirling behind Mike's eyes. Harvey starts to moan, low and desperate, his face buried in the crook of Mike's neck—his hips stutter, and stutter harder—and Mike finds himself halfway wishing Harvey wasn't wearing a condom, even though he knows it'll make cleanup ten times easier, just so he could at least imagine he was feeling the hot, wet spurt of Harvey's come inside him.

To Mike's surprise, Harvey doesn't pull out when he's finished. Instead, he stays, Mike's knees still hoisted over his shoulders, cock still half hard inside Mike, nipping occasionally at the soft underside of Mike's throat. He pulls lazily at Mike's cock, as well, thumb swiping back and forth over the exposed head until Mike is poised, trembling, on the verge of orgasm, with no idea how long he's been there.

As soon as Mike tips over the edge, the rush of pleasure spilling out of him with a shout, Harvey all but topples over with a relieved groan. He slips out of Mike, wincing a bit, and chucks the condom off the edge of the bed. It lands with a wet splat that Harvey ignores in favor of wrapping himself around Mike like some sort of mutant octopus.

"Harvey?" From somewhere, Mike dredges up the strength to shove at him a bit. "Harvey, come on, we're gonna be sticky."

"Already sticky." Harvey mumbles. "Rest now. Get up when the food gets here."

"That…is actually a really good plan," Mike manages around an enormous yawn.

Harvey snorts, and tucks Mike little closer – and they sleep.

 

\-- End --


End file.
